To the extent they serve as a game-like score, grades themselves constitute bribes. Grades do carry a small amount of information as to proficiency, and to that extent they are OK.
In Montessori there are no grades, but rather detailed itemizations of proficiency in each exercise combined with qualitative evaluations by the guide.
Although not trained in Montessori, the author and speaker Alfie Kohn is famous in the Montessori community for his book "Punished by Rewards" and others. See his YouTube, "It's bad news if students are motivated to get A's".
The Slashdot summary quotes the New York Times as "after terminating the Constellation program...", but the real quote uses the subjunctive: "President Obama’s plan for space, announced this year, would terminate the Constellation program." Obama doesn't write the budget bill, Congress does. And according to a March 24 Orlando Sentinel blog, "House panel vows to save Constellation":
Members of the U.S. House panel with direct oversight of NASA vowed Wednesday to oppose White House plans to cancel the Constellation moon rocket program, calling the proposal a “deficient” idea that could jeopardize U.S. leadership in space exploration.
The criticism, from both Republicans and Democrats, underscores the difficulty that President Barack Obama faces in convincing Congress of his plan, which would terminate Constellation and instead rely on commercial rockets to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.
I predict that the usual political sausage factory will preserve some part of Constellation. Look how long the F-22 lived on life support.
For those of you who happen to be in the industrial automation & data acquisition field, and were wondering "what, Datel makes XBox controllers now?" -- this is evidently a different Datel.
After some Googling, it seems that the data acquisition Datel was acquired by C&D Technologies in 2004, which in turn was acquired by muRata in 2007.
The DAQ Datel was not some obscure company. They had the datel.com domain, which currently forwards to murata-ps.com.
The jobs killing bill just passed. As if the other penalties for reaching 50 employees weren't bad enough, now there is a $37,500/year fine for hiring employee #50. And look out if you hire employee #200 -- the fine jumps to $1 million per year. Healthcare got so messed up in the first place by tying it employment -- this only makes it worse.
There are other perverse incentives. The $750 fine per employee (for firms with between 50 and 199 employees) constitutes a regressive payroll tax, discouraging the hiring of lower-wage entry-level employees in favor of higher-wage higher-productive employees.
With computers past and present -- Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, iPhone -- with "instant on", why does Windows not have this yet? This goes back to the lost decade. What has Microsoft been doing since XP was released?
A software layer emulating hardware acceleration can't be that hard, especially given the existence of good documentation of the software and hardware interfaces. Must be much easier than developing MAME, for example. Somebody will do it.
It reminds me of Windows 3.1 -- how one had to purchase Trumpet to connect to the Internet.
Except the difference now is XP satisifies many user's needs, while Windows 95 provided compelling reasons for users to upgrade from Windows 3.1.
Executes the cellular automata game of LIFE in the blitter chip. Uses a 318 by 188 display and runs at 19.8 generations per second. Author: Tomas Rokicki
It occupies an area of around 1,000 by 2,500 kilometers, and has an average elevation of over 4,500 meters.
The plateau is a high-altitude arid steppe interspersed with mountain ranges and large brackish lakes. Annual precipitation ranges from 100 mm to 300 mm and falls mainly as hailstorms. The southern and eastern edges of the steppe have grasslands which can sustainably support populations of nomadic herdsmen, although frost occurs for six months of the year. Permafrost occurs over extensive parts of the plateau. Proceeding to the north and northwest, the plateau becomes progressively higher, colder and drier, until reaching the remote Changthang region in the northwestern part of the plateau. Here the average altitude exceeds 5,000 meters (16,500 feet) and year-round temperatures average -4C, dipping to -40C in winter. As a result of this extremely inhospitable environment, the Changthang region (together with the adjoining Kekexili region) is the least populated region in Asia, and the third least populated area in the world after Antarctica and northern Greenland.
Back before Linux was popular, source code licenses were common and understood. Especially common for software development libraries, you could pay one price for the binaries, or a higher price for both binaries and source, but it no case was it ever understood that the product was not proprietary.
Then Linux came along and somehow "closed source" became a synonym for "proprietary", and "open source" a synonym for "free" (gratis). Microsoft feeds into this by not releasing the source code to Windows. Windows would be an even stronger (proprietary) product, IMO, if the source code were available.
Lawrence Lessig tried to rectify this false dichotomy by founding the Creative Commons. But the public has little knowledge of the existence of the Creative Commons, let alone the particulars of any of the licenses it offers.
The Linux community shares some of the blame by touting libre, gratis, and "open source" in the same breath. This lawsuit is a consequence of that.
I also deal in large amounts of scientific data (though only about 20GB per week of new data), and I prefer to keep it all online in order to analyze past data. For now, an 8TB Buffalo Linkstation will do for me. For when I outgrow that, I have been considering -- and have not yet tried -- a Drobo.
Each Drobo has 8 bays of 2TB drives for a total of 16TB. And 255 Drobos can be linked together over Ethernet to create a single virtual volume of 4 Petabytes.
To back it all up, just buy more Drobos and store those in a separate location. They're too big for a safe deposit box, so your home is just as good as anywhere else (assuming your home is different than your office) -- or a temperature-controlled storage unit if you don't like that idea.
If you can afford it, I recommend the backup strategy I use, which involves four complete sets of the data. The main one is online. The second is always connected to the network and receives a backup nightly via xxcopy (yes, I manage a file server in Windows -- shoot me). The third is on-site but not connected to the network and gets rotated with the second weekly. The fourth is off-site and gets rotated to on-site quarterly.
If you're really wed to the idea of off-line archival storage, get these for each customer -- get two so you can have two sets of data in case one goes bad:
Although the indictment makes heavy use of the word "bot", Wiseguys did not use viruses or trojans to create their bot farm. They paid for it themselves, with their own computers, purchasing varied IP addresses from varied ISPs across the U.S. to prevent Ticketmaster's et al IP address blocking.
In the old days, ticket wholesalers would hire hobos to stand in physical line. In the Internet era, is it now necessary for ticket wholesalers to not only put a hobo in front of a computer, but to apply for a credit card for the hobo as well? And this is because Slashdot readers now all of a sudden support click-through EULA's on websites? The crux of the indictment is that Wiseguys defeated Ticketmaster's et al human identification by defeating Captchas and using purchased varied IP addresses.
The ticket windows (Ticketmaster et al) are trying to engage in price control, which never works. Ticket windows had limited success in outlawing ticket brokers. Now in the Internet era it seems ticket windows have discovered a legal avenue to harass the ticket brokers by calling automated Captcha completion "hacking".
Wiseguys never engaged in malware or theft. They merely sought to purchase what the ticket windows had for sale in response to the market distortions -- in the form of price controls -- the ticket windows had set up.
A present-day time traveler going back to 1988 might be surprised to read this New York Times article that extols:
The hottest young English pop star of the moment is Rick Astley, a 21-year-old singer from a suburb of Manchester, whose debut single, ''Never Gonna Give You Up'' (RCA), has sold a million copies in Britain and reached No. 1 ranking in almost every other European country. The song is now rapidly climbing the United States pop charts and is the country's best-selling 12-inch single.
The record's most striking quality is Mr. Astley's voice - a rich, throbbing baritone that suggests Tom Jones crossed with Luther Vandross. It is definitely not the kind of voice one expects to hear on a contemporary dance record. Since ''Never Gonna Give You Up,'' Mr. Astley has gone on to score two more major English hits, ''Whenever You Need Somebody'' (the title song of his debut album) and a revival of ''When I Fall in Love,'' which re-creates note for note the classic Gordon Jenkins arrangement for Nat (King) Cole's 1957 recording.
Mr. Astley is the latest discovery of the successful producing and songwriting team of Stock-Aitken-Waterman, which also produces the group Bananarama. The team has popularized a streamlined homogenized pop-disco sound with an unruffled high-gloss surface that stands in marked contrast to the more angular, rhythmically inventive dance-funk of Prince and his disciples.
''I'm influenced by a lot of black American artists,'' Mr. Astley said in a recent telephone interview. ''Luther Vandross is one of my favorites, and I like James Ingram and Jeffrey Osborne.''
At least for now, Mr. Astley is content to have his voice packaged by Stock-Aiken-Waterman.
''I like dance music,'' he said. ''I'm happy doing what I'm doing and want to get more deeply into it.''
Astley's videos were a big thing at the time, coming just two years into MTV's decline that was precipitated by Viacom's purchase of it and MTV still had some of its original appeal of showing a) videos that were b) popular.
Sending messages over SSIDs is not passive-aggressive, it's avoidant. It could be considered passive-aggressive in a contrived example, such as if a neighbor makes lewd comments to your wife, your wife demands that you talk to the neighbor about it, but instead you decide to communicate over SSID. In that case, you have a responsibility set up by an authority of sorts, and you have ducked that responsibility by fulfilling its terms perhaps by letter and certainly not in spirit.
"Passive-aggressive" is a catch-phrase that has been broadened in pop psychology, in part because the Internet has permitted so many more avoidant behaviors and people need a name for it and use the one that has enjoyed more use in the popular (primarily entertainment) media.
At what point does obscurity become security? 3,727 attempts corresponds to 12 bits of entropy. According to NIST, that's the equivalent of a 5-character user-selected password. The same document stipulates a mere 10 bits of entropy for some applications.
Wow, I never knew Superman was inspired by the Progressive Era fascination with eugenics. I guess after the Nazis it all got whitewashed with "high gravity" on Krypton and "lack of Kryptonite on Earth".
By getting a college degree, you are ensuring a literacy level of at least what would have been a seventh-grade education 30 years ago. With just a high school diploma, one's literacy level would only be at about a third grade level 30 years ago.
Computer programming is of little value without the ability to communicate.
I have to hire college graduates to change diapers at the school I run -- to ensure that when they do speak to the children, they do so with correct grammar.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes the tenets of faith and is binding upon all Catholics. Thus, given the text of paragraph 2243 of the Catechism, it would seem that all Catholics in South Carolina must register as "subversives":
Armed resistance to oppression by political authority is not legitimate, unless all the following conditions are met: 1. there is certain, grave, and prolonged violation of fundamental rights; 2. all other means of redress have been exhausted; 3. such resistance will not provoke worse disorders; 4. there is well-founded hope of success; and 5. it is impossible reasonably to foresee any better solution.
Slashdot Mirror
In Montessori there are no grades, but rather detailed itemizations of proficiency in each exercise combined with qualitative evaluations by the guide.
Although not trained in Montessori, the author and speaker Alfie Kohn is famous in the Montessori community for his book "Punished by Rewards" and others. See his YouTube, "It's bad news if students are motivated to get A's".
Members of the U.S. House panel with direct oversight of NASA vowed Wednesday to oppose White House plans to cancel the Constellation moon rocket program, calling the proposal a “deficient” idea that could jeopardize U.S. leadership in space exploration.
The criticism, from both Republicans and Democrats, underscores the difficulty that President Barack Obama faces in convincing Congress of his plan, which would terminate Constellation and instead rely on commercial rockets to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.
I predict that the usual political sausage factory will preserve some part of Constellation. Look how long the F-22 lived on life support.
Back in the Bush I recession, COBOL was the hip language to learn.
After some Googling, it seems that the data acquisition Datel was acquired by C&D Technologies in 2004, which in turn was acquired by muRata in 2007.
The DAQ Datel was not some obscure company. They had the datel.com domain, which currently forwards to murata-ps.com.
Youth makes one a cheaper coder, which in the eyes of management is better.
Did anyone else, having read just the headline, think this was about Mick Jagger?
I wonder whether Albert Gonzalez ever self-identified as "Cuban-American" or whether the Fourteenth Amendment was repealed.
There are other perverse incentives. The $750 fine per employee (for firms with between 50 and 199 employees) constitutes a regressive payroll tax, discouraging the hiring of lower-wage entry-level employees in favor of higher-wage higher-productive employees.
With computers past and present -- Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, iPhone -- with "instant on", why does Windows not have this yet? This goes back to the lost decade. What has Microsoft been doing since XP was released?
It reminds me of Windows 3.1 -- how one had to purchase Trumpet to connect to the Internet.
Except the difference now is XP satisifies many user's needs, while Windows 95 provided compelling reasons for users to upgrade from Windows 3.1.
Just a reminder that using a graphics processor for non-graphics purposes has been around since at least 1986.
Executes the cellular automata game of LIFE in the blitter chip. Uses a 318 by 188 display and runs at 19.8 generations per second. Author: Tomas Rokicki
It occupies an area of around 1,000 by 2,500 kilometers, and has an average elevation of over 4,500 meters.
The plateau is a high-altitude arid steppe interspersed with mountain ranges and large brackish lakes. Annual precipitation ranges from 100 mm to 300 mm and falls mainly as hailstorms. The southern and eastern edges of the steppe have grasslands which can sustainably support populations of nomadic herdsmen, although frost occurs for six months of the year. Permafrost occurs over extensive parts of the plateau. Proceeding to the north and northwest, the plateau becomes progressively higher, colder and drier, until reaching the remote Changthang region in the northwestern part of the plateau. Here the average altitude exceeds 5,000 meters (16,500 feet) and year-round temperatures average -4C, dipping to -40C in winter. As a result of this extremely inhospitable environment, the Changthang region (together with the adjoining Kekexili region) is the least populated region in Asia, and the third least populated area in the world after Antarctica and northern Greenland.
Wow, a Class L planet.
No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now, when I started speaking.
Then Linux came along and somehow "closed source" became a synonym for "proprietary", and "open source" a synonym for "free" (gratis). Microsoft feeds into this by not releasing the source code to Windows. Windows would be an even stronger (proprietary) product, IMO, if the source code were available.
Lawrence Lessig tried to rectify this false dichotomy by founding the Creative Commons. But the public has little knowledge of the existence of the Creative Commons, let alone the particulars of any of the licenses it offers.
The Linux community shares some of the blame by touting libre, gratis, and "open source" in the same breath. This lawsuit is a consequence of that.
http://www.drobo.com/products/droboelite.php
Each Drobo has 8 bays of 2TB drives for a total of 16TB. And 255 Drobos can be linked together over Ethernet to create a single virtual volume of 4 Petabytes.
To back it all up, just buy more Drobos and store those in a separate location. They're too big for a safe deposit box, so your home is just as good as anywhere else (assuming your home is different than your office) -- or a temperature-controlled storage unit if you don't like that idea.
If you can afford it, I recommend the backup strategy I use, which involves four complete sets of the data. The main one is online. The second is always connected to the network and receives a backup nightly via xxcopy (yes, I manage a file server in Windows -- shoot me). The third is on-site but not connected to the network and gets rotated with the second weekly. The fourth is off-site and gets rotated to on-site quarterly.
If you're really wed to the idea of off-line archival storage, get these for each customer -- get two so you can have two sets of data in case one goes bad:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822154428
In the old days, ticket wholesalers would hire hobos to stand in physical line. In the Internet era, is it now necessary for ticket wholesalers to not only put a hobo in front of a computer, but to apply for a credit card for the hobo as well? And this is because Slashdot readers now all of a sudden support click-through EULA's on websites? The crux of the indictment is that Wiseguys defeated Ticketmaster's et al human identification by defeating Captchas and using purchased varied IP addresses.
The ticket windows (Ticketmaster et al) are trying to engage in price control, which never works. Ticket windows had limited success in outlawing ticket brokers. Now in the Internet era it seems ticket windows have discovered a legal avenue to harass the ticket brokers by calling automated Captcha completion "hacking".
Wiseguys never engaged in malware or theft. They merely sought to purchase what the ticket windows had for sale in response to the market distortions -- in the form of price controls -- the ticket windows had set up.
The nanosecond the earth stood still.
Astley's videos were a big thing at the time, coming just two years into MTV's decline that was precipitated by Viacom's purchase of it and MTV still had some of its original appeal of showing a) videos that were b) popular.
"Passive-aggressive" is a catch-phrase that has been broadened in pop psychology, in part because the Internet has permitted so many more avoidant behaviors and people need a name for it and use the one that has enjoyed more use in the popular (primarily entertainment) media.
At what point does obscurity become security? 3,727 attempts corresponds to 12 bits of entropy. According to NIST, that's the equivalent of a 5-character user-selected password. The same document stipulates a mere 10 bits of entropy for some applications.
Wow, I never knew Superman was inspired by the Progressive Era fascination with eugenics. I guess after the Nazis it all got whitewashed with "high gravity" on Krypton and "lack of Kryptonite on Earth".
I think we finally have the answer to Friday's Ask Slashdot.
Computer programming is of little value without the ability to communicate.
I have to hire college graduates to change diapers at the school I run -- to ensure that when they do speak to the children, they do so with correct grammar.